Piombino Apollo Statue Analysis

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In the cycles of the art world, artistic styles progress over time and new innovative techniques embody an era, but the past periods never truly fade from the mind of the artist, hence periods like the Renaissance, a rebirth of an older era of art. However this retrospective obsession with art can meddle up an art history timeline if a statue is not properly dated to the correct era. This is case the regarding the Piombino Apollo, a statue found at sea in 1832 with a complex history of study where it eventually made its way to the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. The statue looks extremely archaic, like a kouros, but some more advanced stylistic evidence on the statue contradict the earlier claim regarding an archaic date and places it in a later Hellenistic one. The …show more content…
The statue, a hollow-cast bronze, is fully frontal with a ridged and stiff posture (Ridgway 1967: 46). The left foot is taking a step forward, but both feet are firmly planted on the ground. The chest is square and bulky, yet the features, such as the abdominal muscles and the pectoral muscles are barely defined because of a lack of modeling with the “omission of digitations or ribs” (Ridgway 1967: 50). The statue is in the nude, like archaic kouros are. The face is angular with high copper brows and copper lips that are demonstrating the prominent archaic smile. The face is almost feminine in its style with the graceful features (Ridgway 1967: 46). This is not what is normally expected of a face made in the Hellenistic era, where the focus would be on the naturalistic features and dramatic expressions. The eyes have not made it through the test of time and are now missing but they would have been made of a precious dark stone, glass, and bone, like archaic kouros. The hair looks like it is beaded, which is a characteristic of kouros but the actual style of the hair, tied back, is not representative of the archaic

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